News Releases

September 12, 2006 in Belgorod the far right wing group "Belgorod National Corps" was found guilty of the assault of a Roma family.

Mass riots took place this weekend in a small - less then 40 thousand people - town of Kondopoga in the republic of Karelia (which is situated to the North of St. Petersburg). It began with an ordinary fight of drunken people in a restaurant and finished with pogroms against people from the Caucasus and clashes of the local inhabitants with the riot police.

The International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) and the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG) condemn the ethnically motivated riots that occurred in the city of Kondopoga in the Russian Republic of Karelia during the weekend and call for prompt and effective measures to bring to justice those who incited and participated in the violence.

The period between end-July and early August 2006 in Russia was marked by an outburst of nationalist violence, leaving at least two dozen casualties, including one death.

July 24, 2006, in Moscow, Dmitry Demushkin, the leader of an extreme rightwing neonazi group called "Slavyansky Sojuz" (or SS) was detained for several hours.

July 25, 2006, in St. Petersburg, the jury found four young men not guilty of the September stabbing death of a Congolese student Roland Epassak, 29.

On July 28, 2006, president Vladimir Putin approved the amendments to the law "On Countering Extremist Activity." The amendments have raised great concern within civil society in Russia, but the criticism seems not to have been taken into consideration as the bill moved quickly through the State Duma (lower chamber of parliament): the first, second, and third readings were held on June 28, July 7, and July 8, respectively. On July 14, the Council of Federation (upper chamber of parliament) approved the bill, even though some of the senators surprisingly criticized it for representing a threat to civil rights.

Review of the new book: Roger Griffin, Werner Loh and Andreas Umland, Eds. Fascism Past and Present, West and East: An international debate on concepts and cases in the comparative study of the extreme right. With an afterword by Walter Laqueur. Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2006.

On 26 June, Human Rights First, an American NGO, released two new reports on hate crimes in the Russian Federation. Executive summary in Russian of the first report is available.

Russian rightwing radicals celebrated June 12, 2006, an official holiday known as Russia Day, with a number of attacks and meetings in different Russian regions.